Exploring the Appalachian Trail, a five-volume series of hiking guides, now fully revised in a second edition and ebook editions (Stackpole /​ Globe Pequot).

TEACHING

At Emerson College, in the graduate program in Publishing and Writing, in 2016-17, I will teach "Book Publishing Overview" and "Book Editing." See QUICK LINKS, under SELECTED WORKS.

Umbrellas at a Beijing bus stop.

TRAVEL

Travel writing and editing assignments have taken me far and wide. Summer '15, Canadian Maritimes, plus the French island of St. Pierre; Fall '14, on sabbatical in Europe, from Rome to the Scottish Highlands. Next up, Florence, Italy, publishing conference, By the Book, June '16. Dream trips still to come: Morocco and Patagonia.

"From Canada, in cursive to die for, mother narrated for me the turbulent weather blowing in from across the twenty-five mile wide lake in front of our house. She told me about grey herons and screech owls and flying squirrels and fire flies that coasted right by her window. So many delicious words, so many exquisitely formed letters. I read, in her steady, always fully legible script, about the long awaited arrival of each summer’s crops of Silver Queen sweet corn and Big Boy tomatoes; about the tradesmen (her charmingly antique term) we had known for decades who stopped by, unscheduled, to fix whatever needed fixing and never gave her a bill. There’s no denying that a certain yearning abides in my heart for one more letter from her, postmarked Lowbanks, Ontario, Canada, because the quality of her handwriting, regardless of the banality of the news she passed on, confirmed in an instant that she still had her wits about her, that the effort required to add a touch of graciousness to life still seemed worth making.

I like to believe that still, somewhere, in that more gracious world, the ascenders rise in a handsome stretch skywards, the descenders dangle playfully like children’s legs off a dock on a warm summer’s day, the roundness of “a’s” and of “q’s” and the sensuous curves of “s’s” and “r’s” and the arresting angularity of “z’s” – that all these scratches on the page still yield something beautiful, personal, and meaningful when strung together with patience and care. The clock moved glacially in Mrs. Goldfus’s classroom in 1953, but not one of us was restive to leave our seats during the long penmanship exercises. Mastering the skill of writing in cursive with a straight pen was tantamount to learning to ride your bicycle with no hands – something every cool kid was determined to do.

Mrs. Roosevelt wrote her column "My Day" six days a week for over a quarter of century, covering everything from politics to child rearing to the arts. Arthur Schlesinger called her "a remarkable woman." Indeed.

A cornucopia of essays, journal entries, poems and more -- all about how America's most famous and oldest long hiking trail, from Georgia to Maine, was conceived and built, and how it is enjoyed by over four million people a year nowadays.